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Sunday, April 17, 2011

Ceramic buttons


I spent several days designing buttons with various trees on them. I designed over 40. I chose 6 designs to run my first test as you can see here. I then made a stamp-mold.

Rolled out a nice slab of clay and smoothed all the marks out.


Then I started stamping away.

This is actually the second attempt. My first set of buttons I cut out by hand and they were pretty rough. So for round 2 I fabricated a cookie cutter out of a film canister. I cut off the bottom of the film canister, cut out the button and then used a sponge to push the button out of the canister.
I hand punched all the button holes but I think I would like to fabricate a button hole puncher so that the holes are uniform. These still need to be smoothed out by sanding and then fired and glazed.
Not all of them will be buttons, some will be necklace medallions, some will be for bracelets and earrings.
These will measure approx 1" in diameter and approx 1/8" thick when they are finished.

1 comment:

Sherry said...

What wonderful insight you have! These are GORGEOUS!! I especially like using the wheel, but I'm beginning to see what all I missed out on not doing hand-built and stamps! But that's because I don't have the vision that you do .. keep up the marvelous work and best wishes always! ~Tatikan/Sher